In University Place, left, Shaun Zaken, a second year student in the School of Speech, and Mary Alyce Kania play dewy-eyed freshmen who both work in a coffee shop. However, it's strictly platonic; she has set her cap for someone else.

Forget Melrose Place, Dawson's Creek
and Beverly Hills, 90210. The buzz at Northwestern these days is
about University Place, a soap opera about college life created by
Northwestern University undergraduates that premiered last fall.

The house was packed at the Ryan Family Auditorium of the
Technological Institute to see the first episode of their student-produced, student-acted and student-written soap.

"The audience laughed at the right places and sighed when it
was sad. It was a totally interactive thing," says senior Chad Hodge,
who with Sabrina Eisenstadt is co-executive producer.

The brainchild of theater major Eisenstadt, University Place
chronicles the travails of 12 undergraduates at a fictitious university.

"You could call it a cross between Beverly Hills, 90210 and
Dawson's Creek," says Eisenstadt, a third-year student who grew
up watching All My Children and General Hospital with her mother. What
she and her 70 undergraduate collaborators are trying to develop
is a show that all students can relate to.

"We want to establish University Place as a campus tradition,"
says Eisenstadt. If it attracts network attention, so much the better,
say members of the show's executive board.

When Eisenstadt came up with the idea for the show, she
"hired" two radio/television/film majors, Stefanie Stein and Alex
Hughes, to write the pilot. Stein and Hughes recruited 10 more
writers, who were each given a plot line to work on. After churning
out the first episode, a crew was assembled and auditions held.

Close to 200 people from an array of academic disciplines tried
out for the soap last spring when the casting directors, senior Elisa
Gil-Osorio and Hodge, who now manages all business and external
affairs for the show, held auditions. The two also looked through
freshman "face books" and approached students on campus who
they thought had the right "look" for
the soap.

Half the selected cast turned out to be students majoring in
theater, a less than surprising fact given Northwestern's reputation
as one of the best training grounds for acting. But Hodge, who did
television commercials while still in high school, was wowed by the
untrained actors, like Medill senior Josh Inch, who also made the cut.
Inch gave up a spot on Northwestern's wrestling team to play the
role of Luke on University Place.

Although the makers of the soap intend to keep their show
light, upcoming episodes will bring up some troubling issues,
including date rape, alcoholism, poor grades and money problems.
And high on the list of topics will be the obligatory heavy dose of
romance and relationship difficulties.

The first episode previewed some of the dilemmas to come:
Will All-American, soccer-playing Paul leave his younger girlfriend
behind for a high-paying job in Silicon Valley? Will Luke, the "bad
boy" of University Place, win over the cautious, career-oriented
Gina? Will Jamie give up the "kind-hearted brother" role and let the
woman he loves know how he feels?

Only watching University Place will reveal the answers to
those questions. In the meantime, Eisenstadt and Hodge have
proven extraordinarily resourceful in pulling the show together on a
shoestring budget. A contest among campus bands resulted in an
energetic, highly professional theme song for the soap, while a bar
night at a local tavern and an appeal to parents last spring brought
in much-needed cash.

Shot on 3/4-inch videotape, the first show was produced for
roughly $4,500, a tiny fraction of the budget for even one episode of a
network soap. Costs, of course, were kept down because of the small
army of unpaid students doing everything from lighting, acting and
camera work to providing refreshments. Hughes and Stein wrote
four episodes that follow the pilot, and the crew shot them in the
winter. All five episodes were shown back-to-back on campus on
several occasions this spring.

Working on the soap opera proved to be a greater time
commitment than any of its cast members or executive board
members ever imagined. Their days often were filled with meetings,
rehearsals and long weekend shooting schedules.

Senior Bill Holderman, who played Paul, the fellow who may
(or may not) be Silicon Valleybound, learned a basic Hollywood lesson: Shooting sessions are
arduous and always take longer than expected. "Even if you have
only two lines to say, you'll be on the set for six hours," he says.

But for almost everyone involved, working on University Place
was a labor of love. More than a few called it a defining experience
in their years at Northwestern. And many of the show's cast and
executive board members have been bitten by the entertainment bug.
Several were students in the Business of Show Business, a course
offered by the School of Speech. The class was taught by Los Angeles
entertainment lawyer Peter Nichols (S78, GS78), who flew to
Chicago every other week during the fall quarter.

About a dozen of the University Place collaborators went to
Hollywood last summer to gain firsthand knowledge of the
television and film capital. Hodge and Holderman had internships at
small production companies and talent management agencies. Actor
Inch worked for an Evanston-based Web publishing group when he
was in Los Angeles and did a commercial promo for the Montel
Williams Show.

University Place lost its first cast member when junior Cheryl
Tsai was recruited by an agent and dropped out of school to pursue
an acting career in California. But the show goes on. Tsai was
replaced
by senior Medill student Janet Choi, who in turn was superseded by
Peggy Yu, a freshman in the School of Speech.

For more on University Place and whether it becomes a campus
tradition, well, stay tuned.

Wendy Leopold is a senior editor in Northwestern's Department of
University of Relations.